


like a gently creeping vine

by bigfootsflannel



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Domestic, Fluff, M/M, affirmations, high school sweethearts all grown up, they're basically an old married couple while still being babies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:02:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26691103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigfootsflannel/pseuds/bigfootsflannel
Summary: People were always shocked when they found out how long the two had been together: minus a two-week period in college, they had been together since they were just teenagers.[Sylvix Week 2020 Day Seven - Married/Domestic Life]
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 9
Kudos: 105
Collections: Sylvix Week 2020 Fic Collection





	like a gently creeping vine

**Author's Note:**

> title is from 'when i'm married' by wilder adkins

Nobody ever expected teenage relationships to last. To be fair, for the most part there was probably some logic to that. People rarely grew up to be the same kind of people and have the same priorities as adults, and it was even rarer for two people to change in similar ways. Staying eye to eye was… a huge ask, really.

But, truth be told, Felix had never cared that much about what anyone else said or thought, and he was far too focused on what he had with Sylvain to let any of that get to him.

People were always shocked when they found out how long the two had been together: minus a two-week period in college (when Sylvain had left for a semester abroad and Felix had tried to tell him he didn’t have to stay loyal, until Sylvain had in turn convinced him he didn’t want anyone else), they had been together since they were just teenagers. He was only in his twenties but he had spent an entire decade of his life in a single relationship.

Though, to be fair, Felix also suspected that part of the shock for some people was that they were together at all. Sylvain, even still, was big on physical displays of affection. He was a deeply tactile person, and in private Felix was more than happy to indulge him, but when anyone else was around besides people like Ingrid who had been in their lives forever, they kept a reasonable distance.

He had never known adult life without Sylvain being a part of it.

They'd gotten engaged when he was twenty, married when he was twenty-two.

-

_ The ring was hidden in Sylvain's sock drawer. _

_ It was just about the only place that he was confident that Felix wouldn't find it, no matter how cliché a hiding place it was, because Felix  _ hated _ doing laundry. He'd never be the one to fold and put it away (especially not if he had to pair socks, truly the worst part of doing laundry), and honestly Sylvain found a certain bliss in taking care of it, so it was perfect. _

_ Until Felix ran out of gym socks in his own dresser and decided to just borrow a couple of Sylvain's. _

_ He'd forgotten about going to the gym entirely when he found the telltale velvety box, and he'd opened it - for just a second, to prove to himself that it wasn't what he thought it was - before snapping it shut again and sitting down on the bed. _

_ He sat there for a couple of hours, just holding the ring box in his hand and staring blankly at the wall in front of him, his mind desperately trying to work through this. _

_ Sylvain had an engagement ring. _

_ It wasn't unreasonable - they'd been together for six years. If they were older, people would have been asking for ages now when they were going to get married. But he was twenty; they were both still in college. They were young. Was it too young? _

_ He hadn't even realized how much time had passed until he heard the front door to their apartment open. He usually had time to go to the gym, come back, and shower before Sylvain got home from class. _

_ "Hey Felix. I didn't feel like cooking, so I picked up Thai. Hope that's cool with you," he could hear Sylvain's voice coming from down the hall. There was the rustling of the bags on the kitchen counter, then footsteps moving closer. _

_ Felix knew he should have taken the chance to put the ring back where he'd found it and just walk away, but he didn't have it in him. _

_ "Fe?" Sylvain was in the doorway to their room now. There was a brief pause, and then he said, "Oh, shit." _

_ Felix looked up at him, and he felt a bit guilty then. Sylvain looked so - concerned? Scared? "I, ah. I needed socks," he said. "I didn't think…" _

_ Sylvain nodded slowly, and the smile quickly returned to his face. "You know what, actually, maybe this is for the best," he said with a little laugh. "I've been trying to figure out the right way to do this." _

_ "Propose?" he asked, and he was sure it was clear from his voice that he couldn't quite believe that this was happening. _

_ "Yeah. I thought about waiting, but - it feels right, you know? We can have a long engagement, hold off until after you've graduated before we start to plan the wedding," he said. _

_ Felix spent a moment then just looking at Sylvain, and the facts were these: he loved Sylvain, more than he had reasonably thought possible to love someone. He knew that his life was going to be spent with him, one way or another, and it was really just a matter of whether he wanted to agree to marry him now or later. _

_ “So,” Sylvain said, reaching out to take the ring box from Felix and sinking down onto one knee. “What do you think?” _

_ Ultimately, the sight of Sylvain’s face, so beautiful and hopeful and honestly even  _ scared _ was more than enough for Felix. This man was his future. So he nodded as he reached out to tug Sylvain to his feet, smiling into it as their lips met. _

_ “I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to ask,” he said when he pulled back. There was the sting of tears in his eyes that weren’t just yet shed, and thankfully Sylvain had the tact not to mention them. _

_ “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, his hands already taking Felix’s left hand and carefully sliding the ring onto his finger. “Felix Hugo Fraldarius, will you marry me?” _

_ “Yes,” he said, barely able to get the words out of his mouth before Sylvain was kissing him again. _

-

It was good.

They argued sometimes, but it was never anything that couldn’t be fixed, and generally speaking they’d both come a long way and spent enough time with their respective therapists that they had a pretty healthy thing going, and Felix was proud of it. He liked their routines, and he took comfort in them.

“Annette’s sick so we’re calling off game night since Mercedes needs to take care of her,” Sylvain told him one Thursday evening as he flopped himself down onto the couch beside him. “Which means that we have the evening all to ourselves now.”

Felix looked up from the book he had been reading, nodding in acknowledgement of Sylvain’s words. “Do you have anything in mind?”

“Not really,” he said with a small shrug. He shifted his position, immediately finding his way to being horizontal on the couch, his head coming to rest in Felix’s lap. “Though this does mean we’ll have to figure out dinner for ourselves.”

“You’re truly suffering, huh. None of Ashe’s cooking,” he commented, his hand finding its way to stroke his fingers through Sylvain’s hair.

“Yeah, you get it,” he said with a laugh, looking up at him with a smile. He loved and hated in equal message the way that he could make him feel with just a look.

In the end, their evening looked like this:

Once they got the motivation to get up (which involved refusing to touch Sylvain any further, because it was a little known secret that his bones seemed to melt when his hair was played with), they went to the grocery store together. Felix acted like he hated going to the store with Sylvain, because he spent the entire time every damn time goofing around, but the fact was that he was, perhaps, a little bit amused by it.

They spent ten minutes in front of the Redbox trying to pick out a movie, until in the end they agreed to just go for a double header, and each select one movie.

(“We’re watching Knives Out again?”

“We’re watching Knives Out again.”

“I’m just going to buy it.”)

Once they got back home, they worked in tandem to get their dinner going - Sylvain left most of the chopping to Felix, who made more precise, consistent cuts that cooked more evenly.

They settled in in front of the TV once they had their plates; even though they had a dinner table, they ate most of their dinners in the living room after both having had to suffer through too many uncomfortable family dinners in their youths.

At one point during the evening, Sylvain paused the movie and tugged Felix out onto the patio so that they could watch the sunset, saying some cheesy line about how it was beautiful but not quite so beautiful as Felix, which earned him an elbow in the ribs.

Between movies, they migrated to their bedroom to continue watching, and at some point during it they both fell asleep curled up together under the sheets.

It wasn’t an uncommon way for them to spend their evenings, and it was comfortable and pleasant. When their lives were as hectic as they could be, it was nice sometimes to have something to fall back into.

-

Probably one of the few downsides to being married was the expectation that he attend Sylvain’s work parties. The people that he worked with were generally pretty awful, and genuinely speaking, a lot of them expected Felix to be a whole lot more like him before they met him.

“So, you’ve seriously been married to Gautier for six years?” one guy asked him at the Christmas party. He had definitely introduced himself, but the name had gone in one ear and straight out the other; it might have begun with an L. Or maybe a J. It didn’t matter.

Felix nodded, already deeply hating this conversation and very much wanting to just walk away from it. Walk away from the whole party, maybe. He’d been wrestled into a reindeer sweater and he looked ridiculous, but Sylvain had kissed him and told him how beautiful he was, and maybe Felix was a bit whipped. “Yes, just about,” he said with a nod.

“Huh,” the man responded, looking at Felix with slightly squinted eyes. “I don’t really see it.”

“See what.”

“What he sees in you,” he said, his tone making sound as though it should have been obvious. “I don’t see how you would work together. You’ve been standing around since you got here, meanwhile he’s talked to just about everyone here already.”

It was true that Felix hadn’t gone out of his way to greet anyone here; most of the time he went just to be polite, being that he wasn’t much for socializing, and generally he would end up in a corner with Bernadetta, the only person besides Sylvain who worked here and wasn’t intolerable company. “And?”

“And it doesn’t really add up,” he said. “I was surprised enough to hear that he’s married - and to a man, no less. He makes great sales with female clients, I was sure he’d slept with some of them.” There was a look on his face that told Felix that he still believed that.

“That just demonstrates that he’s good at his job,” he said.

“Maybe. Still, you got married when you were kids,” he said. “He must be bored out of his mind by now. There's a reason divorce rates are so high.”

Felix wanted to give him a piece of his mind. He wanted to punch him, wanted to back him against a wall and put the fear of Sothis in him, but he knew better than to cause a scene now. It would only cause trouble for Sylvain.

But that was about enough for him, especially because he had, in fact, finally laid eyes on Bernie; it wasn’t as though they were best friends or anything of that sort, but she was much more pleasant company and he did have something to ask her about after their last session. He didn’t bother with any niceties as he removed himself from the conversation, just moving in her direction instead.

He was secure in his relationship with Sylvain, and they knew each other well enough that they had no other choice but to be direct with each other about everything; they’d know if anything was up if either of them tried to pretend when something was up.

He glanced around the room, his eyes landing on Sylvain, always so easy to spot in a crowd. As if feeling his eyes on him, Sylvain looked over, a small smile appearing on his lips as he gave him a quick wink before returning to his own conversation.

Yes, they were absolutely fine.

-

Except that it started to eat at him.

He knew that Sylvain wouldn’t cheat on him, that part of it was a non-starter. He was absolutely not concerned about it.

But… It wasn’t inaccurate to say that Sylvain might have had a different lifestyle without him in it. When they were in college, he’d go out to bars and clubs far more often than Felix did, and while that wasn’t a problem, it might have been the sort of thing he did more if he didn’t have someone at home waiting for him. Sylvain  _ had _ always craved excitement. He’d always felt so constrained by the expectations that were held for him, the life his father had expected him to have.

So why would this be any different, just because he had chosen it for himself?

Their lives were full of routines. Thursday night game nights, Sunday brunches, Saturday hikes. Evenings spent together on their couch, going on walks together, cups of coffee made perfectly to each other's preferences without having to ask, playing with the cat. It was all so… mundane.

He tried not to let it bother him, because he had never in his life allowed what a stranger thought of him to impact his life. And as far as he could tell, everything was good between them.

But it wasn't just a stranger. Before they'd even gotten married, she'd tried to warn him to wait at least a few more years. Ashe had, on more than one occasion, commented on what a "remarkable" pair they made, which Felix felt like was probably coded language. Hell, whenever he would talk to his father, Rodrigue would gently ask about how they were doing, in a way that made it clear he expected to hear that they weren't doing well.

In spite of all that, Sylvain seemed just as happy as ever. 

But he also didn't know that to do if it were to turn out that Sylvain wasn't as happy as he let on. He wasn't sure how to make things more lively (outside of bedroom activities, anyway), and non-monogamy was strictly off the table for him.

It made his heart clench as he watched Sylvain cradle their cat in his arms to carry her back to bed.

(Mia liked to sleep between them, or to steal one of their pillows when they were too close to allow her room, but she had to be kicked out whenever they wanted to have sex. Years ago, Felix had told Sylvain to make it up to her by collecting her and bringing her back to their room. He'd been doing it ever since.)

"Here's baby," Sylvain announced as he allowed the cat to jump from his arms to the bed, slipping under the covers to immediately pull Felix in close again.

"You or the cat?"

"Me, obviously," he responded with a laugh, leaning in and pressing a few lazy kisses against Felix's throat.

"Ah, of course."

They laid there like that for a minute until Sylvain pulled back slightly, still looking at Felix, his thumb brushing along his collarbone. "You're good, right?"

"What?" he asked, though he knew he didn't really need clarification. He should've expected that his melancholy would be picked up on.

"Are you okay?" he asked. "Is something bothering you?"

And he really didn't want to make Sylvain worry, especially not over something that  _ had _ to be nonsense. "Yeah, no, I'm good," he said, leaning in to give him a kiss to reassure him. "I think I just didn't sleep that well the past couple of nights."

Sylvain nodded solemnly. "Alcohol does seem to fuck you up for a few days," he said. "I think I've got some melatonin, let me see."

It kind of made Felix want to cry, but he didn't. Sylvain was so fucking caring in that casual way of his, and Felix would do anything for him.

-

"Insert… Hold on. I don't think I have a piece that looks like that," Sylvain was mumbling to himself as he looked over the directions for constructing the desk he'd picked up from Ikea.

Felix hummed in thought, cradling his coffee mug in his hands as he moved over to him. It was too early to be thinking about this. "Show me," he said as he leaned over his shoulder. 

"It's step four," he said, pointing to the diagram as he held up the instruction booklet.

"Ah." He bent over, grabbing one of the pieces and holding one up for Sylvain to look at. "I think this is it. It was just at a different angle."

"Right you are," he said, shifting and getting onto his knees for long enough to steal a quick kiss before carrying on to put the piece in place. Glancing back at Felix as he moved to sit down, he added with a wink, "You're not just pretty, you're a genius."

"The two most important qualities in a person, yes,” Felix commented, rolling his eyes at him.

“Well, two of them,” he agreed, giving him a quick wink.

Felix just shook his head, settling in to watch Sylvain as he worked on constructing his desk. This wasn’t an uncommon way for them to spend a Saturday - a day of rest instead turned into a day to desperately try to get things done. Sylvain was surprisingly strict with himself about taking on tasks and then completing them, so miraculously he never carried over too much of a to-do list, and sometimes he even had to prod Felix to find new things for him to do. About once a season, the entire apartment would be upended because he’d decided to vacuum behind all of the furniture.

It was another routine, and now that Felix was actually thinking about it, he was realizing that it was, also, terribly domestic. They’d fallen into these similar movements over the last several years, and while of course they weren’t beholden to them and most of the time they did go out and did fun things on the weekends, but there were plenty of weekends where they  _ didn’t _ . They’d spend plenty of time just like this, working on various projects together or independently, and not even thinking about going to see other people. Was this what Sylvain had ever wanted his twenties to be?

No matter how much Felix told himself that he was being ridiculous, it tore at him until it came bubbling up. “If you were bored, you’d tell me, right?”

Sylvain stopped for a moment, looking at him with an expression of great confusion on his face. “Bored?” he repeated, as if he had never heard the word before.

“Yes, bored,” he said, his tone taking on a hard edge to make up for the inherent vulnerability in the question. “With me.”

“Bored with you,” he echoed slowly, and if Felix had gotten the nerve to look at him, he would have found that he was now looking at him as if he had sprouted a second head.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s - I know that this isn’t…”

“Isn’t what?” Sylvain asked. He had put down what he was doing and was now making his way over to Felix, kneeling in front of the chair he was in, looking up at him. “Fe, what are you asking?”

“I’m trying to be proactive,” he said. He wanted to look away, but he made himself maintain eye contact with Sylvain. “I’d rather not lose you, so I thought that if there was some way to address anything…”

“I - there’s nothing to address,” he said. “On my side, anyway. Are  _ you _ good? Are you bored with me?”

That was a reversal that Felix hadn’t quite been expecting. “What? No. Of course I’m good,” he told him. “That’s not the point here.”

“Uh, yeah it is. This conversation has to have two sides,” he said. “And clearly this question didn’t just come from nowhere. So let’s talk about whatever is happening here.” It was a little bit frustrating, sometimes, how Sylvain had gotten better at open and honest communication over time and with the help of therapy, even though at the same time he knew that it was for the greater good.

The thing was, though, that Sylvain’s answer to the question had been so easy and honest that he was starting to feel ridiculous for spending so much time thinking about it at all. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s just… Something someone said. I knew it was bullshit, but… I can’t help but wonder if this is actually what’s best for you. What you actually wanted.”

“Okay, whoever you were talking to clearly has no idea what they’re talking about,” Sylvain said, his hands taking hold of Felix’s.

"And you say that now, but is that how you're going to feel forever?" he asked. "When you're older, are you going to look back and wish that you'd… I don't know. Had more freedom? Excitement?"

Letting out a long breath, Sylvain shook his head. "Freedom?" he echoed. "I don't - what kind of freedom do you think I'm missing out on?"

"You  _ know _ what kind," he said.

"I'm not going to regret not fucking more people," he said, words plain and to the point in a way that reminded Felix more of himself than Sylvain. "You're who I chose. My partner in everything I do, all that good shit we put in our vows. I have the kind of freedom that actually matters to me."

"And what kind of freedom is that?"

"The freedom to choose my life for myself," he said, shaking his head. "That's something you've always represented for me. You always showed me that I had a choice."

Felix didn't say anything for a moment, mulling that over. It was true that the life they were living was one that Sylvain's father never would have chosen for him; that was part of why he was so certain that they were doomed to fail, after all, wasn't it? He was so certain that his way was the only way.

Sylvain squeezed his hands, bringing him back to the present moment. “You set me free, without even trying to,” he said. “Even when it felt like it would’ve been easier to give in and be the perfect son and marry myself off to whatever girl would be the most beneficial to the family business… You reeled me back in.

“And listen, in case you didn't notice, I also choose to not have excitement all the time,” he said. "I like what we've got. I like being here, home with you. You and Mia are the ideal company, and we’ve got a perfectly good social life. I don’t  _ need  _ more than this.”

“You're sure?” he asked, clearing his throat after because there was no way that his voice sounded that small.

“I’m completely sure,” he said with a nod, pushing himself up so that he could kiss him softly. He looked back down at their hands, his thumb brushing over the rings on Felix's left hand. “I knew what I was doing when I gave you that ring. I know it might not have felt like I was taking it seriously, but…”

“I know,” he said softly.

Sylvain nodded. “You're the one thing I've always taken seriously.”

Felix kissed him again, resting their foreheads together. “Thank you.”

“You don't have to thank me. This is my job, you know? Keeping you happy,” he said.

“You’re a sap,” he told him, shaking his head in mock disdain.

“And you love that,” Sylvain said brightly. “One last thing? You mentioned losing me. There’s no chance of that, got it?”

“Okay. And you’re not losing me, either.”

“I know it. Listen, Felix, you’re stuck with me. Not even death will do us part,” he said, his smile growing into a more playful grin. “Now, c’mon. This desk isn’t going to build itself and I’m too much of a buffoon to do it myself.” Just as easily as he knew how to soothe Felix, he knew when to change the topic and lighten the mood again.

If Sylvain spent the next few days seemingly finding (and taking) every excuse he could find to touch Felix and show him affection and remind him how much he loved him, well… he wasn’t going to complain just this once.

**Author's Note:**

> idk i feel like when i thought of this there was more to it? but i am tired
> 
> say hello on twitter @bigfootsflannel


End file.
